★★★★

Here's the prose
Previous to the 15" Macbook Pro Retina that I'm writing this review on, I used a self-built 4GB quad-core desktop computer that was housed in a beautiful lian-li aluminum case and ran linux (most of the time, Ubuntu) for five years. It was fast, powerful, quiet and didn't degrade in any noticeable way, over those five years. So I had high expectations of any subsequent computer.

Firstly, I still cannot believe that the MBPR uniformly beats my old computer in graphics, display resolution, processor speed and memory capacity. Its form factor is stunning, it's portable and yet it's able to data mine a 11GB dataset without R crashing or spontaneous combustion.

The $2.2k price tag is indicative of the fact that it's pushing the boundaries in what laptops are able to do, no doubt it's high - but it's understandable. In terms of quality of build, spec, display quality and integration with software I think the MBPR is the best mainstream laptop on the market.

I have deducted a star because the battery life, after 7 months of use, is quite disappointing. It is now hovering around 3-4 hours maximum of battery life. If you watch a video full screen it shoots right down to little over 90 minutes. I try and minimize battery cycles, however in 7 months the battery health is at 66%. I am not convinced, from the trend in battery degradation, that this laptop is truly built to last. At the moment it seems that watching video full screen is the most taxing thing you can impose on the laptop, it noticeably heats up.

Here's the summary

• I own a 15" MBPR with 16GB RAM, 2.4GHz, 250GB storage. I really recommend this spec, don't skimp on the RAM - you need to future proof the laptop, the upgrade in processor speed & hard drive seem a waste of money however.
• I've owned the product for 7 months with no hardware defects. The battery life has shrunk from about 6 hours to 4 hours which is not ideal. It seems like I'll need to replace the battery within 3 years of use.
• The screen looks great and I have never personally had problems with non-optimized applications.
• I am still blown away by the form factor, it's so thin and slides into my college bag like it's not there.
• I love sitting on a train or a plane and cracking into big datasets that I'd previously have had to ship off to a supercomputer, on my laptop.

I feel like I've answered this question so many times now, but I will give you my insight on what I think. I think we will see a major upgrade for the MacBook Pro this year. We should expect it to have a new design. It may be thinner, lighter, etc, and cut down on I/O and ports and maybe USB-C— all in 12-inch MacBook fashion, I would expect. I would expect it to come in four colors like the MacBook— silver, gold, space gray, and rose gold. Most importantly, I would expect it to have a major spec upgrade— we should see Intel Skylake as the processors, and maybe upgraded internals (flash storage, memory, etc). Now whether all this would be announced at WWDC, I have no idea. If we look at Apple’s recent trends for WWDC, it seems they have been reluctant to announce hardware at WWDC in the past couple years, narrowing the focus of the conference more towards software and services. In fact, the last time a hardware product was announced at WWDC was back in 2013. So if we look at where Apple seems to be going with WWDC, it is entirely plausible we don't see a new MacBook Pro with Retina display at WWDC, but maybe later in the year (September) or early 2017.

"Future-proofing" is a fallacious concept with computers due to how fast technology in this space improves. You should only get a Retina Display Macbook if you value the good display. Both the normal Macbook and the Retina Macbook will be obsolete in a year when Apple comes out with the new latest and greatest.

In my opinion, $1800 is already a tremendous amount to pay for the baseline 15" Macbook Pro, and it isn't even very good. The only deal that can be considered good is the baseline Retina Macbook at $2200.

If you're just going to high school though, you don't need a freakin $2200 laptop. When I was your age, kids these days, etc.

It will come eventually, likely to all Macs. At the moment, I can imagine Retina displays of that size are mighty expensive to produce. As the technology becomes easier and cheaper to produce, it will come. Jacking up the price of that entry level Macbook Pro could jeopardize sales to incoming college students who have found that $1200 price point just right. For example, the Macbook Air was a poorly specced product when it first came out, and it was $1500+ for a basic model. As the technique and process of producing such a thin product became easier and cheaper, prices fell (pretty dramatically, a MBA costs $999 now)

I purchased a retina MacBook Pro when they were first announced, and then returned it about two weeks later and instead purchased a non-retina MacBook Air. I find the retina display to be completely unusable for serious design work (Digital design work that is. Print work may not suffer from the same issues).

The key reason for this is that as a designer, it's critical that you're able to view your work through the same lens as that of your end user. The simple fact of the matter is that as of 2013, the vast majority of computers are not retina display-equipped. What this means is that if you're designing a website, you're unable to view the design at the same pixel density as the majority of your users will, and by necessity will be forced to view it either pixel-doubled, or in retina resolution (assuming you make the effort to design for retina displays at all).

I suppose some designers may be able to adapt to this and trust that their design will look correct even when they can't actually see it that way, but I certainly have tried and cannot. Until the day comes when the baseline is a retina display, I need to cater to my audience, which is overwhelmingly stuck in the @1x era.

Yes.

These Retina Displays are confusing people. There are all sorts of people who don't own the new iPad who are sure the display is nothing special. And there are those of us who live with it who are quite certain it is the most enjoyable computer display to read on we've ever had. And many of us have been reading on computer displays since the Apple II / Commodore 64 days.

And, no, this isn't some sort of cognitive dissonance at work. I have a Macbook Air and an HP Envy laptop. I read on all three of them regularly -- in the course of working and playing on them. There is simply no substitute for the beauty of a high-resolution display. None.

Keep in mind, also, that the Retina model is the new design, which is about 1 pound lighter and 1/4" thinner. It also incorporates a full-size HDMI port on board. The only reason to get the non-Retina model is if you are among the small (but real) minority of people that makes regular use of the optical drive.

Find the extra $300-400 and don't look back.

I think so. As Dan Zhang said, you are already spending upwards of $1800, and the MacBook Pro with retina display is, in my opinion, very-much worth the extra $400. Here's why:

• It's lighter. This is probably something you will find yourself bringing to classes or taking places to meet people. Taking a pound off – making it 20% lighter – and making it significantly thinner makes all the difference when it comes to fitting in your backpack.
• In high school, I began doing an incredible amount of reading on my laptop. I was writing notes, papers, reading essays, emails, doing research, and all of this can hurt to read after a while unless you're looking at a screen like the retina display. I went from having an iPhone 3G to an iPhone 4S, and the retina display is an astonishing difference, immensely improving the ease of reading.
• Flash storage (as seen on the MacBook Pro with retina display) writes data faster.
• The one with retina starts at 8GB of memory, whereas the regular, $1800 MBP starts with 4GB of memory.

All of this, in my eyes, makes it worth it. That said, I think it's important to try both. Go to the Apple store and try using both models you are considering. Try reading articles on both screens, see if you notice the difference after a while. Try running various apps. See if one gets hotter or louder than the other. $400 is a lot more money to spend on a laptop if the differences aren't notable to you, so I think that this step is really necessary.

Best of luck and have fun!

Technical issues may include video card and battery. Until now, Apple can't fit a dedicated GPU in a 13" pro to come with an Intel Core processor. Retina displays are demanding and challenges with the iPad 3rd-gen's graphics despite the quad-core GPU help prove that.

As for battery life, the Retina Pro 15" has a much bigger battery (95Wh vs. 77.5Wh for the non-Retina version), but it only maintains the 7hrs advertised battery life. It would take a lot to address both issues considering how long it's been taking Apple to put a dedicated GPU and there's not much innovation in battery technology.

Removing the optical drive from the 13" Pro will surely make a lot of room, though. But we still can't tell if that room is enough and Apple would also want to make the 13" Pro slimmer while it's at it like what it did with the 15" Retina. Maybe Apple could've pulled this off engineering wise, but had other business considerations, but the GPU and battery challenges are definitely there.

Here's a longer piece I wrote about the Retina display for the Air: http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/13/3083023/retina-display-for-the-macbook-air-eta-and-practicality

In its lowest configuration, 8GB memory, 256GB disk and i5 cpu, yes.

When you compare it to the Macbook Pro 15", then no, it is absolutely too expensive. Put in a i7 cpu, 512GB ssd and 16GB memory, and you are almost at the same price as the much more powerful 15" Macbook pro with much more powerful CPU, way more powerful graphics processor and larger screen, while still being just a little heavier.

But when you compare it to similar PC machines, like Thinkpads or Surface Book, the 13" easily holds its own and is actually quite cheap. Don't try to compare it to plastic Lenovo or some cheap PC machine, you are not comparing similar machines.

The 13" Macbook Pro has almost a full work day battery, fantastic keyboard and a trackpad that is out of this world, nothing compares to it. And the screen, wow. And the operating system, OSX of course fully supports the machine and has extensive power saving features that nothing comes close to.

So, unless you fully spec it out, it is very well priced, and even cheaper than most other real competitive machines out there.

The only real competition is the 15" Macbook pro.

Just a little side note here. I have been doing extensive tests and trials all through 2015, really testing things. I am a linux fan boy #1 (Redhat certified) but just can't get used to using it on laptops and there are always some things that are unsupported, like wifi waking up after sleep, it is very close. I actually used Windows 10 for significant amount of time, a few months as my primary work computer, got used to using Windows and when it comes to driver support on the PC computers, Windows has it. But by the end of the day, the build quality, battery support and overall usage of Macbook with OSX has just left me spoiled. I was willing to rough it out a bit to minimize my Apple usage, as it costs me a pretty penny, but after a whole year of trying to find some way out of the Apple economy system, I am unable to do so, without paying more and getting worse system.

You can use it almost anywhere. I have used mine on coffee houses, pubs, open offices, but when totally covered in sun light, like on the beach, nope, not really.

I have not seen any machine you can really do much work on at the beach or in direct sunlight, except for the e-ink kindle.

Though if pressed, you sure can, I have done so, once when a server broke, I was on the beach (on vacation), with my computer in my car. I sat at the next table with sunglasses, I managed to fix a code, test, publish and start the server, an hour or two of work with my iPhone as a hotspot. I could do it, I just would not do that again. A little sun umbrella would be a much needed accessory.

So WWDC stands for Apple’s WorldWide Developer’s Conference. It’s not primarily a spot to announce new hardware. While it’s been done it’s not a routine thing. So no, I don’t expect new hardware announcements.

WWDC is for developer news: new software, new APIs, things that Apple wants developers to do, or to take notice of. It’s all about developers and the software tools they use, and the software APIs they use to write and deploy apps and Mac apps.

Over time the keynote has WWDC keynote has evolved and become almost a “state of the Apple union” type of talk. But even taking that into consideration, don’t mistake WWDC for a product announcement venue.

Product announcements tend to be in the spring and fall. Lately there’s been several in the fall for phone, iPad, or Macs. The spring announcements in recent years have been for iPad and the watch and TV.

What do you mean glitching?

I can think of two glitches you might be talking about:

1. The Stage Light Effect. This is when the bottom of the display appears to be different in brightness every few mm horizontally. It looks like stage lights shining from the bottom up. This has happened a lot over the years and if you want a visual idea of the stage light effect, just google it and as MacBook at the end.
2. Netflix Green Flash. I do not know if this is a common or rare occurrence but it basically you’ll see the screen flash green for shorter than a second whilst you’re watching Netflix in full screen. This happens to me on my 2018 MacBook Pro but it doesn’t bother me that much. It doesn’t happen on YouTube and I haven’t tried other streaming services like Hulu or Amazon.

If it is something else then please try to describe the glitch better to me or reply to this with a photo.

I have a MacBook pro mid 2015 with Retina display and so far this is the very best mac i had since 20 years, except for one thing : Eyestrain problem. The glossy screen is so clear and that i had try many ways to reduce glare witout success.(Night shift always on, reducing brihtness , glare protector etc…). I never had this problem b4 when i was using Macs with matt screen. i can hardly read blurred subtitles when watching movies, it rapidly causes eyes fatigue.

Aside from that my MacBook is just perfect. If someone finds a solution please keep me posted.

P.S I called Apple and they have no solution…

To answer your concern, it is more of a technicality reason. If one may notice, the Retina Display technology has always been about a specific size of the display versus the distance at which it would be viewed.

In the Apple product strategies, the Retina Display has been strategically placed in products with only one size of display: iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, and the new iPad. They have followed the same strategy with their new flagship product - next generation MacBook Pro.

The fight here is specifically the technicality of the ppi (pixels per inch) of each of this device that is to be marketed under the Retina Display moniker. So, if the display size varies, for example to a 13" Retina Display MacBook Pro, then:

1. The existing 220 ppi for the 15" Retina Display MacBook Pro, will have to increase slightly to 225 or 230 ppi (just a guess, not calculated), so that the developers do not have to bother about recreating another set of applications just for the new size. But this increases the cost of production of higher density Retina Display in comparison to its 15" counterpart.

2. The existing 220 ppi would remain the same to save cost of production, but will force the developers to create another set of applications for the new screen size.

The second option will never be a factor that would influence Apple to make a decision, but its been put there for the sake of practicality.

Apple will most likely take up the first option by changing the dynamics of the supplier market by purchasing a gigantic amount of display panels and other peripherals, as it does always.

Therefore it is a matter of time and production execution with advancements in the technical implementation.

With the plethora of rumors around the next new iPhone (iPhone 5) having a 4" screen (vs. the existing 3.5" Retina Display), the above explained strategy will probably work out well with Apple, although that creates another set of problems - would developers update their applications with the new aspect ratio (4:3 vs. 16:9)?

I have answered this with an innovative thought (in my opinion!): Sreehemanth Prakhya's answer to Why didn't Apple provide more usability features or APIs of the iPhone 5's larger 4" screen, at least for the existing apps?

“Retina” is a label Apple invented to make a simple declaration out of a complex perceptual problem. It is supposed to apply to resolutions of pixels more dense than the average human eye can perceive. Presumably any display that has highly dense concentrations of LEDs appears as though it has no detectable pixel edges and such.

If you sit some distance away from a desktop monitor (let’s say 6 ft.) your eyes are able to see a nice picture and no pixelation. Sit directly in front of the same monitor and you’ll likely be able to see jagged edges and other pixel effects. Distance matters here. Many people hold a phone very close to their face, so it matters that they not see any jagged edges. But at a farther distance it gets harder to distinguish that kind of detail. Graphic artists work long hours with a screen close to their eyes. It helps with subtle details that can make a big difference in how your work is received.

Today most good quality monitors and mobile screens are high enough detail to please most people. MacBooks have had them since about 2010 if I recall correctly.

Here are the points you should note before buying anything new.

1. Obviously costly than that of the old products released.
2. Might have previous features removed.
3. Better products would be way higher at cost than lowend products.
4. On a keen observation you don’t have much feature to boast about.

You might as well note some good products of last year would be removed since they would be better than the low end products of this year.

Note your requirement. If you are already a buyer of this products it’s not wise to go for the current product in current year.

If you are a new user note that it’s always best to invest on a high end product.

You might have a hardware specification to settle with. If you find the product of such a specification then go for it.